


The Scrubs

by reogulus



Category: Ookiku Furikabutte | Big Windup!
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-23
Updated: 2014-08-23
Packaged: 2018-02-14 10:02:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2187567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reogulus/pseuds/reogulus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A few minutes passed in silence, and then the platform was just ahead of us. Suzuki climbed the concrete steps two at a time so that he overtook me, walked right over to the pole, and stood very still next to it by the time I stepped to his side. In the rapidly fading skylight the redness around his eyes was receding as well, the front of his gakuran jacket open and moved slightly in the wind, kept steady at the bottom where his fingers twirled around the bronze button, with embossed patterns obscured by the darkness taking over.</p><p>I cleared my throat. “You think there’s another machine in it for me if I see you all the way home?”</p><p>“No. Just send the goddamn text when the train comes. And never speak of this to anyone ever.” Suzuki looked at me like he was really, really offended, and I tried not to laugh, which of course made him even more irritated. “What?”</p><p>“Nothing, um. Your brother. He takes classes at Sakitama now? That’s a busy schedule.”</p><p>Suzuki looked away, perhaps out of prescience that anything he could say in response would sound unreasonable even to himself. “He does what he wants, and I’ll do what I think is best.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Scrubs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [transversely](https://archiveofourown.org/users/transversely/gifts), [kuruk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuruk/gifts), [khepria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/khepria/gifts), [cephea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cephea/gifts).



> The story of an unlikely not-quite romance between a tortured and privileged pitcher and an ex-player who seems neither of those things, taking place in the spring of the year after current events in manga canon. Features several minor characters, either canon or OCs, who are included so as to make coherent sense of a tangled web of Kasukabe-centric events in canonverse which involve characters from several schools, dreamed up by yours truly & friends.
> 
> Please beware of sensitive themes such as implied family trauma, drug use and mild self-harm.
> 
> Thank you to transversely, kuruk, khepria and musard for indulging my incessant requests for comments and revisions via Google Docs and Skype, I will not write something similar to this in length for a very long time. This one is for you all.

 

 

 

※

 

Before I knew Suzuki Aoi, I’d seen his name too many times in the newspapers. His face I’d come across slightly fewer times in photographs and videotapes, and once sort-of-in-person when I was tasked with filming a Kasukabe game at Oomiya stadium. And as it was with my consistently awful performance in Math class, the first time I saw him in the flesh, it did take me a few minutes too long to put two and two together.

It was during a practice game with Kasukabe’s second string team, the first practice game hosted on our grounds ever, not long after the club received a grant to expand our fields. I was there to watch, in plain clothes. The day before, Izumi had made some pretty graphic threats on the non-serious side, the joke being his assumption that  I would wear my ouen uniform to the game...because I wouldn’t know better.

So I was standing there, scanning for gaps in the massive crowd of white and purple, scouting for a seat that would afford me a decent view. I got to the game half an inning late because my shift at work took longer to wrap up than usual, but I didn’t mind. Nishiura’s offense was just about to start anyway. Some guy had taken the centre spot on the top row—couldn’t see his face from where I was, but the purple K on his white cap was hard to miss, even under the glaring sunlight. I walked up the steps and sat at a distance appropriate enough for strangers, and it was just in time for Tajima’s first at-bat that he called out to me:

“Hey, you over there!” His voice cut through the excited buzz from the mass of Kasukabe baseball club members seated below us. The crowd grew noticeably quieter as he spoke. “Do you mind?”

I turned to look at him, slightly annoyed that I had to engage in an unsolicited conversation when the Kasukabe pitcher was gonna make his next pitch to Tajima. “Sorry?”

“Nishiura’s section is over there.” He lifted his cap off his head and pointed to his right. The cap dangled off his outstretched arm by its tongue.

“Huh,” I rose to my feet so I could see his face better, now that his cap was off—well, the newly-revealed shock of spiky brown hair should have been my first clue. “I didn’t know there was a seating plan.”

“There is now.”

I laughed—I really shouldn’t have, but it made me nervous to see his huge amber eyes. They showed no trace of humour or easiness over such triviality. I was painfully aware of the time that passed as I looked back at him, unable to shift my gaze or find the words to respond. Somewhere in the distance, an umpire shouted something, but I couldn’t decipher whether Tajima got on base or not. And then something clicked as I noticed he was _really_ getting impatient with me. “Oh, right, you are—Kasukabe’s ace, Suzuki-kun? N-nice to meet you.”

“Sure, you want an autograph?”

I managed not to laugh this time. “I’ll, um, get out of your way. Enjoy your stay at Nishiura!” I said the second part using my work voice. You know the one—that “please come again” greeting every cashier at the convenience store must have said to you at one point or another in life. I didn’t know why my instinct was to treat Suzuki Aoi like a disgruntled customer staring me down at the counter when he was in fact craning his neck to look at me.

“You’re fucking weird,” he said as he put his cap back on.

I cringed at the words and walked away as fast as I could. Before I turned away, I caught one last glimpse at his face out the corner of my eye; the line of his mouth was hard, but I think he was smiling. At the time I thought it was the heat stroke getting to me, and I certainly hope it was the heat stroke in hindsight, but I just...well.

I never told Suzuki about it and I doubt I ever would. _Weird_ didn’t even begin to describe me, or him, or anything between us from that point onwards.

 

※

 

“Suzuki Aoi?” Izumi nearly choked on the filling of his riceball, then promptly swatted my hand away when I reached over to pat his back. “He’s pretty scary, isn’t he?”

“He definitely didn’t look happy when the game was over,” I stated the obvious to pass it off as a coherent answer. Everyone from Kasukabe had looked varying degrees of gloomy when they boarded their buses after the game was over—7 to 5, despite the three-point home run that one of their second years hit in the fourth inning.

“I heard enough from Yuuki-san to know that he’s not someone to be screwed around with.” Izumi finished his riceball in two bites. “Did you see him up close in the stands?”

“Uh...sort of.”

Izumi narrowed his eyes with the sardonic irritation that usually indicated he was not going to let me hear the end of something. “If you’re going to lie to my face, at least make a good effort.”

“Have you met him?”

“Once. He came by the batting cage to drop something off for Yuuki-san when we went together. She introduced us, and there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but you could tell he had those vibes about him. His brother was a little bit nicer. Well, just a little bit.”

I poked around the pickled radish in my lunchbox, thinking that my run-in with Suzuki Aoi was probably not very bizarre at all compared to Tajima and Izumi’s acquaintance with the former cleanup and captain of Kasukabe. Sometimes I still had trouble processing that Tajima’s enthused rambling about his “nee-san” was referring to the ponytailed girl captain whom we’d never faced in a game, as opposed to one of his actual siblings. Her, I’d only seen in the newspapers. I couldn’t remember her face well, but she must have been pretty in the photos—though dare I say it, Kasukabe people all looked pretty much the same to me.

“Anyway.” Izumi craned his neck a bit and looked to the door. Probably to check if Tajima and Mihashi were back from the washroom yet, “I hope Suzuki Aoi didn’t give you trouble, or if he did, it was probably because Suzuki Ryo didn’t even show up.”

I almost dropped my chopsticks under the table. “Wait—seriously? Isn’t he the captain, though? I thought he was in the dugout—”

Izumi shook his head. “It was something like a conflict about a class he’s taking on weekends away from Kasukabe. I don’t know what kind of curriculum he was following. I’m sure he had a legitimate reason, but Momokan wasn’t too happy to hear about it.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that information aside from muttering, “Shit” under my breath, and shoving some more radish into my mouth as Tajima and Mihashi walked through the door. But really, the more I heard about that school the less sense it made to me. I supposed it was a blessing that it fell on the very outside of the outer orbits of my already-cluttered daily life. Still, I was intrigued by the tidbits of information that fell into my lap through layers of hearsay, that irrelevant gossip about legacy schools that got middle schoolers excited came time for high school entrance exams. I hadn’t been around for the thick of it due to my stay in rehab for my elbow, but I’d heard enough to have had some ambitions of my own. According to some people I’d known from back then, I had a knack for dreaming up frivolity at even the lowest points of life. Fast forward ten months, a girl from my class last year told me it was an important skill if not marketable. She called it compartmentalization.

I didn’t know if I’d learned better since then. I probably hadn’t, else I wouldn’t have mentioned Suzuki Aoi when I was eating, of all times.

 

Of course, when I was talking to Izumi about Kasukabe, I wasn’t expecting to see him again. Seventeen years was long enough for a person to realize some encounters and acquaintances weren’t meant to last longer than a glance or a conversation. Fortunately, I’d nailed it down to a rhythm by this point: trying not to fall asleep in class, apologizing to the class rep for the baseball club members’ lack of contribution to class errands, trying not to fall asleep at work, and staying a day or two ahead of homework deadlines. Running the ouendan was about the only part of my life that could possibly count as “spicing it up.” Everyone at school that knew I lived on my own envied my the so-called “freedom,” but in reality, if I wanted it, I probably could have lived more comfortably in another way. But that was beside the point.

The point was, I didn’t think I would ever meet Suzuki, let alone any other Kasukabe team member, off a baseball field. I would prefer if life had gone that way so I wouldn’t have a story to tell; anyhow, the truth was that Suzuki Aoi showed up at my place of employment at the beginning of my shift one day, and, to put it gently, turned my day upside down. Laying my eyes on him and recognizing him was the only moment during my entire work history at that place where I genuinely wished I’d worked a service job in an actual convenience store instead of, well, a love hotel.

Yes, I did work at a love hotel. No, that did not make the rumours true. I was by no means reckless when I accepted the job to improve my attendance record for the year. I was offered stable shifts on Friday and Saturday nights, unlike the irregular hours I used to work that forced me to skip class. Of course, even though the hotel was located a good five blocks away from Nishiura, even when I exercised the option to use pseudonyms at work since day one, word travelled before I could realize. The only small blessing was that no one in the baseball club knew all that much about it, for which I owed many thanks to my dear underclassman Izumi.

Still, I couldn’t help regretting that decision when Suzuki made eye contact with me. It was 5:30 on a Saturday afternoon and definitely months since the practice game where we met. He’d walked through the doors, alone, wearing his school uniform with his gakuran jacket and gym bag half slung over his shoulder, scanning the decor in the lobby with uninterested, judgmental eyes, which only grew more distinctly uninterested and judgmental when he recognized me.

 

“Welcome, sir, how can I help you?” I stood and gathered up the nerves to greet him as if he were anybody else. He just laughed, quiet but brought echoes in the near empty lobby.

“You work here?”

My co-worker, who was lounging in his seat texting his girlfriend, gave me a frowny look. I cleared my throat. “Yes, I do.”

He tilted his head dramatically to read my name tag. “Inoue? Really?”

At that point I realized Suzuki did not know my real name, and had to hold back my smile, never mind that I wouldn’t be Inoue next shift anyway. “Do you require any services from us, sir?”

“No.” Suzuki pulled out his wallet and took out some bills. “Get me a room, I just need some rest time alone.”

The rest of our encounter went as by-the-book as the employee training manual would allow. In other words, no questions asked and no answers given, and most importantly, no eye contact.

In all honesty, stranger things had happened at work; but after having to deal with them a few times, you’d learn a thing or two about putting yourself first. And one of the earliest signs of my trouble was that it took a week’s worth of sleeping on the questions to chase them out of my head, along with the significant effort it took to resist looking Suzuki in the eye.

 

※

 

My alarm sounded off at 2pm. Then my fingers followed the conditioned response of turning it off without consciousness coming to play; the rest was autopilot as well. I was drowsy all the way on the train to Sakitama; the forgone hours of sleep seemed to have made a woeful difference.

I was going there on business, technically. To be honest, I wasn’t sure how I was going to help. All I knew was that Tajima had a friend at Sakitama who said their team was setting up an ouendan for the first time and could use an extra hand. I was hesitant out of concerns for my sleep schedule and all, but after some consideration, managing those concerns were easier than saying no to Tajima while he held eye contact.

I’d never been to Sakitama before, and the view, to put it lightly, was unexpected. The minute you hopped off the train and onto the platform, you could see the cornfields stretched out where the roads went mellow, crossing between dirt, rock and concrete. It definitely wouldn’t take reading the word “agricultural” on the plaque nailed to the school gates to make a good guess on Sakitama’s educational focus. In the lazy sunlight of a partly cloudy afternoon, your line of sight could stretch along the miles of greenery for hours if you allowed it—but I had to run, of course.

Though Sakitama was a similarly inexpensive school without a lot of room for pomp and circumstance, its baseball field was something to see. I was struck by how _wide_ it was, for the lack of a better word. It was rounded off by chain-link fences like the regular fields on the south and west sides, and on the north and east sides were the outskirts of the cornfields. For a brief moment I lamented not being able to come here in the mornings. The view of the sunrise from here must be amazing. Definitely a sight anyone would be lucky to wake up to.

“I’ve hit quite a few home runs that way.” Tajima’s friend, the power hitter named Sakura whom we played last year, pointed to the fields and narrated for me excitedly. He was assigned as my guide while I waited for the prototype ouendan to get ready in the auditorium. “It got kind of bad after a while, though, because balls were hard to find after they were off in the fields, and if they were running short we couldn’t just go out and buy—”

“Daichi,” the third-year sitting in front of us, the one with stiff bottlebrush hair that seemed to hold its shape naturally without gel, turned around to give Sakura a look that shushed him effectively. I straightened up a bit and saw the interrupted needlework resting in his lap: beat-up looking baseballs covered in scuff marks being mended at the seams.

“Ah—sorry, Icchan-senpai,” Sakura stumbled over a quick apology, looking around but not meeting my eyes, the attempt to change the topic without sudden awkwardness was all too obvious. No wonder Tajima became good friends with him. “Um, well, technically, first years were not supposed to go into the cornfields! But Tai-san, our old captain, let me go in there anyway because I just felt _bad_ hitting so many balls off so far and I insisted that I should be the one to pick them up as best as I could.”

“And thank heavens that Tai-san did,” the third-year chimed in again, this time as a causal interjection as he resumed sewing up the seams. “The cornfields were the customary locale for the first-years’ kimotameishi during the school fest, and part of not allowing them in there was so that the scares would work the way they were supposed to. If Daichi went in not being familiar with the fields, he’d be crying non-stop and the whole thing would have had to be called off—”

Sakura’s cheeks coloured instantly, but fortunately for him the person approaching the dugout at the same time seemed to have diverted his senpai’s attention immediately. He excused himself after a loud exclamation, remembering that the ouendan’s founder asked him to check back at the auditorium at this time.

 

As Sakura ran out of the dugout, someone walked into it wearing dun-coloured overalls that fit a bit too snug at the shoulders and hips, with a large straw hat dangling off his wrist, “Ichihara, did you say something to embarrass Daichi again?”

There was a warmth to the tone he used to speak with Ichihara that made the reason behind his casualness apparent. He and Ichihara—whom I assumed was a manager, but now the name definitely rang a bell—were the only two people around not wearing practice uniforms. It seemed like Ichihara no longer held a starter position, but I was sure that the person who just came over was not even a Sakitama student, despite dressed head to toe like he was.

“Took you long enough, Suzuki.” Ichihara gave him a half-hearted kick to the shin. “I was just talking to our guest here about some Sakitama traditions—probably definitely no match for the glitz and glamour of Kasukabe, right? Why don’t you come enlighten us on just how uncultured we are? Our Nishiura guest here would be learning something new, too, I’m sure.”

I stood up with my default smile. “Nice to meet you, Captain Suzuki. I’m Hamada from Nishiura.”

“Pleasure.” The younger Suzuki set his hat down on the bench next to Ichihara’s litter of old baseballs and bowed to me. “I am deeply sorry for missing the practice game earlier this month. Congratulations on your team’s stellar performance.”

He straightened up and looked directly at me with those round, bright eyes. It wasn’t the gaze that unsettled me for a moment, but the fact that I could never imagine his pitcher brother ever looking at me with this much focus and intensity. In that split second, the discord blanked out all other thoughts in my head. A composed reply took a minute to reach my tongue, but eventually I managed to say, “That’s quite kind of you, Suzuki-san. It was a pleasure to host your team at our grounds as well.”

Suzuki Ryo nodded. “Hopefully we can arrange to play another practice game soon. I would love to visit Nishiura in-person at the earliest opportunity.”

Ichihara laughed with easy amusement. “Wait, you people lost to Nishiura? How come you hadn’t told me that, Suzuki? Now we have one more thing in common, how nice.”

“The second string, yes,” Suzuki Ryo corrected him with a downturned mouth and smiling eyes. “Shit happens.” His phone rang as he said that, and the smile in his eyes was quickly gone when he checked the caller ID. “Excuse me, I have to take this.” He exited the dugout in a small jog, and looked at me again when he said, “Hamada-kun, it was very nice to meet you”.

“Sure,” I muttered, but the captain was already out of earshot. Ichihara picked up the threaded needle again and resumed his quiet and rhythmic work. Though I did not watch the game he pitched against Nishiura in person, I remembered how I cringed when Tajima told me about the consecutive screwballs at lunch that day.

In the end I decided to say something anyway. “Our manager spent a lot of time fixing up balls last year, too.”

“Ah, I can imagine.” Ichihara tied the thread to a knot and broke the remainder off with a sharp pull aided by his teeth. “But making it to the prefectural Top 16 must have helped with the funding, right?”

There was no resentment or bitterness to his voice, and somehow that was what made it sting. I stayed there in silence, watching Ichihara pick up another ball from the box at his feet, even more scuffed up than the one he’d just mended. There was little doubt to the fact that he’d quit pitching now, but the way he held it still seemed like the leather knew his callouses. I wondered if it was a deliberate display of commitment to a time he’d put behind him. I hoped that it was.

Sakura came running towards the dugout yelling, “Hamada-san! They’re ready for you! Follow me please!”

“Coming!" I shouted back, and turned to look at the ex-pitcher one more time before running out to meet Sakura. Ichihara looked up from the ball and met my eyes.

 

“Thank you for your help,” was what he said.

 

※

 

“How was it like on the other side?”

 

The question came from Sakitama ouendan’s leader, Harada-san, and caught me—thoroughly—off-guard. I turned to look at her, and for a second could not think of a way to reply other than blinking. “Pardon?”

“Sorry if that was a weird question to ask.” She laughed shyly, and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’d watched Reiichi—my little brother, he plays second base here—I’d watched him play, growing up. I’ve been wondering why you looked familiar. Didn’t you used to play as the five-hole hitter for Toujou, Hamada-kun?”

Nobody had casually mentioned my middle school’s name when talking to me in a really long time. Actually, “caught off-guard” was the wrong expression, because at least I was able to nod on reflex without a noticeably awkward pause.

“I’ve never been a player, of course...” She talked a little faster, now, as if nervous for striking up the conversation, “but if I remembered right, Toujou had a really great ouendan! How was it like to play with the music and chants in the background?”

I smiled, careful not to let anything else show. “Yeah, my little brother always came to my games in middle school. It was nice to hear him call out to me while I was on the field. I’m sure your brother is gonna feel the same when the ouendan cheers for him under your direction.”

Her eyes lit up behind her thick-rimmed glasses with hopefulness. Then she thanked me for my words and invited me back for next week’s practice. I couldn’t find a good reason to turn her down.

 

When next Saturday rolled around, and the sight of the cornfields gave rise to a weird, warm fondness in me as I stepped off the train. This time the ouendan was ready in the auditorium as soon as I arrived, and there was a clarinetist joining the trumpeters. I brought the musicians lip balm as a tip and a gift, and helped Harada-san finish embroidering the bold yellow characters on the jet black banner, which would surely stand out from the bleachers even through the shakiest home camera lenses.

“Let’s take this outside and see how it looks in natural lighting,” I said after practice had been dismissed, which brought a smile to the ouendan leader’s face. Both of us already knew it would look amazing. I asked her to hold it up in one corner, and a first-year who’d stayed behind for grounds maintenance to hold it up on the other side, then I took a picture with my phone. The yellow glowed under the setting sun, a soft light that illuminated their smiles.

“Thank you for coming, Hamada-san.” The first-year took off his cap and bowed to me as I headed out. In the emptiness of a weekend evening, the silhouettes of the weathered school buildings seemed further softened in the sunset, their sharp concrete corners rounded off by the greenery that lined windowsills and the colourful skirts of flowerbeds.

Before I lifted my foot to take another step, I had to stop at the realization of just why this place felt so easy to fit into.

In the fading light of the sunset, if I wanted, I could have easily pretended I was back at our old home, the Creaky Villa. The same pots and plants that lined my own kitchen window, things that I’d been told to keep a cautious distance from as a young child. Things that were more resilient than their keepers gave them credit for, things that when I grew old enough to properly take care of, were nothing more than heavy-duty fences and dust settled around demolition machines.

If asked at a job interview, the word I’d use to describe myself would never be “sentimental”. Still, I allowed myself the luxury of waiting another moment before walking off.

 

When I took a turn for the southern gates, the quiet was aggressively disrupted by a voice that one would not use unless they were sure they had privacy.

I wasn’t going to stop and listen, but I heard his name.

 

“For god’s sake, I waited—”

“I’m sorry, Aoi, but—”

“—I know, you didn’t ask me to come—”

“—how could I have expected—”

“—never your fault, of course, there’s always a good reason—even for skipping your own team’s—”

“—this is important to me! And good for me, can’t you—”

“—ever since we were eight? Was it all just pretend?”

 

There was venom in the question, and the silence that ensued was more horrible, enough for me to flinch when Suzuki Ryo spoke again.

 

“You should go home, Anii.”

 

And then there was silence again. I took a deep breath, and stepped on the closest twig on the ground as I walked forward. Suzuki Aoi whipped his head around so fast that I thought he’d shake something loose, if he didn’t sound like he’d just about lost his head already.

Suzuki Ryo looked at me. The sun shone at his back over the top of the brick wall that housed the bike shed, and he looked at me like a man who had run out of ideas but wouldn’t, didn’t know how to ask for help. At the same time, I could feel his brother’s eyes bore holes in the back of my neck.

“Is he taking the train?” I asked, mustering up all the straightforwardness I could manage in a confrontation that was not about me or anything, anybody in my life.

“The red line, then transfer to the purple line at terminal station.”

“Okay, I’ll uh, walk him to the station.” I turned to meet Suzuki Aoi’s eyes at that point, but he wasn’t looking at me anymore, staring instead at a poor tiny shrub that had rooted itself in the sandy cracks between the rusty bike rack and the wall. “Will that work?”

Suzuki Ryo nodded with a hand half-covering his forehead. In the brief pause between his pulling a pen out of the pocket of his overalls and handing his number to me, written on the back of a partially intact receipt (“1 bag of bone meal fertilizer, 1 watering can, 2 pots of citrus herbs”), I thought I should probably just run for it. The gates were within sight and my 50-metre dash results had improved by half a second two days ago in gym class, technically—

But I turned to look at Suzuki Aoi again, and this time he met my eyes, large and blurred and awful. His eyes were round shapes of glass that seemed brittle under the deflected sunlight, if you’d looked too closely you’d see them shattering inward. His brother’s voice sounded terribly distant at my back.

“Sorry for your trouble, please text me when you see my brother off. And anything else you might need in the future for the team, just give me a call, I will be sure to return the favour...and again, I do apologize.”

I started walking towards the gates, right before the second apology was issued. I didn’t expect the pitcher to follow, but somehow wasn’t surprised that he did.

 

“I hate that you had to see that” was the first thing Suzuki said to me that day. The dirt path sank slightly beneath my sneakers; I walked as carefully as I could knowing the person behind me, walking on moist soil as if thin ice.

“At least you’re not sorry,” I replied.

Suzuki gave a humourless scoff. “Why would I be? You asked for it. Bit of a klutz, aren’t you? If you were lighter on your feet—”

I tuned him out and waited until he finished. “No, actually, I thought this would be a nobler way to get a favour out of Kasukabe’s deep pockets than blackmail. I’m sure even your idle pitching machines in storage are shinier models than ours.”

Then I saw a pebble rolling to the side of the path after the dull sound of contact between sneaker and rock from behind me. “Yeah, makes sense.” He sounded like he was swallowing around something.

“Sure.”

I could have said wouldn’t it be worse if you actually felt like you owed me something more, but I also could have gotten my phone out and took a picture of the exact Sakitama building at the exact angle that it reminded me of the Creaky Villa. Learning not to push one’s luck was an old lesson for me. The gods had already smiled upon me for the day, as the dreaded small talk with Harada-san about little brothers or middle school baseball, thankfully, did not continue today.

A few minutes passed in silence, and then the platform was just ahead of us. Suzuki climbed the concrete steps two at a time so that he overtook me, walked right over to the pole, and stood very still next to it by the time I stepped to his side. In the rapidly fading skylight the redness around his eyes was receding as well, the front of his gakuran jacket open and moved slightly in the wind, kept steady at the bottom where his fingers twirled around the bronze button, with embossed patterns obscured by the darkness taking over.

I cleared my throat. “You think there’s another machine in it for me if I see you all the way home?”

“No. Just send the goddamn text when the train comes. And never speak of this to anyone ever.” Suzuki looked at me like he was really, really offended, and I tried not to laugh, which of course made him even more irritated. _“What?”_

“Nothing, um. Your brother. He takes classes at Sakitama now? That’s a busy schedule.”

Suzuki looked away, perhaps out of prescience that anything he could say in response would sound unreasonable even to himself. “He does what he wants, and I’ll do what I think is best.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be,” he practically spat.

The first rays of the train’s lights peeked out from behind the trees at the bend of the rails. I said, “Okay.”

 

When the train stopped, he hopped on like he wanted to be rid of the events of the day (the words, the encounters, Suzuki Ryo, and probably me) without another moment’s delay.

The train re-accelerated, curled into the shape of a half-drawn period at the bend, before vanishing from sight. By that point I was already sick of it, the idea of going home and being alone with thoughts about things that I’d live just fine without.

 

※

 

“You have got to be shitting me,” Izumi said to Tajima as soon as I came back to the classroom. “They just dropped it off at Momokan’s office and helped her set it up? No wonder she dismissed us early this morning.”

Tajima nodded as vigourously as he chewed. “They did! It was wrapped in a purple bow, too, I saw it. Do you think it’s nee-san?”

Izumi just snorted and shook his head while I asked Tajima to fill me in, which was as formulaic as a pretense could get. The remainder of lunch was spent on whether the new machine could match the batting centre’s speed for real, and the earliest time they could try it out themselves. I munched on my apple, thinking if a visit to Momokan would be necessary during afternoon practice. Then again, Suzuki Ryo of all people would know the importance of discretion, and if I were a betting man, I’d chance that he disliked any circumstance that he couldn’t influence directly.

When the lunch table dispersed for the customary midday nap, I put my head down on my desk, wondering if this was—how it was. Just like that, everything tied up as neatly as could be. Suzuki Ryo proved his word’s worth, I got what I asked for, my friends were ecstatic, the twins’ skeletons safe and sound in their closets.

Everything mopped up neatly as the elites were accustomed to in their lives, not missing anything that they couldn’t live without. I knew enough by now that they’d had their own messes, but it was like the call to rehab that I never made until three minutes before the high school entrance exam, that phone number scribbled down on my notebook and keyed into my contacts since forever ago. It was a resolve that you wouldn’t want to finalize until the very last moment. And in this case, their mess was one orgami that I wouldn’t know how to put together after taking one apart.

Nonetheless I wondered if I could see him again, be it a good idea or—and in that moment, my phone buzzed.

 

It was a text from an unknown number, starting with a Kasukabe area code. _That chunky metal thing shiny enough for you,_ Hamada-kun?

 

I didn’t bother asking how he stole his brother’s phone, recalling at a convenient time that this was a person who booked a room in a love hotel for the sake of his own company. I really should have pressed delete.

 

※

 

“Blon—I mean, _Matsuda_ ,” the kogal who just came out of training two days ago called to me as I entered the lobby for my Friday night shift, delivering my random name tag for the night as she said, “You have a visitor.”

“Where?”

“Out back.” She nodded at the southern exit, discreetly annotated with an unlit EXIT sign so as to emphasize its discreetness. “I was hoping to learn your real name through him, but apparently he didn’t know it in full either? Way too pretty-looking for a guy like you but I guess we do get all sorts around here, don’t we?”

“You could have just said pretty.” I decided to ignore the jab directed at me, thicker skin was good for the health in the context of my lifestyle.

“No, pretty- _looking_.” She pursed her lips after the re-emphasis. “Wanna bet that he’s gonna cause you trouble the minute he opens his mouth when he sees you? _That_ would be a really, really pretty sight. Or not!”

“Right, yeah.” I dropped my bag on a chair behind the counter and turned to the door with its spotty door knob and peeling dark green paint. “I have no idea who you’re talking about, Inoue."

She played with the safety pins in her grey skirt and laughed. “Aren’t you a fast learner, though?”

 _No, learning wouldn’t save me from this, very few things in the world would,_ I thought to myself as I peeked out the door and saw him looking at his phone with earphones in, standing quite close to the brick wall but with a carefully maintained distance of some precise centimetres, no doubt out of concern for the goddamned jacket that I wasn’t even sure how often he changed.

 

I let the door fall behind me—it was heavy, and the thud was more than enough to get his attention. He didn’t look me in the eye at first, just pulled his earphones out slowly enough for me to see the bandages on his right hand, brand new wounds and brand new cover to match.

“Sprain your wrist? Didn’t take you for a batting enthusiast.” Because batting was obviously not synonymous with batshit.

He scoffed, as he was prone to do at this point. “It was from _pitching_.”

I looked to his knee and made it obvious enough that he’d know where I was looking. “You pitch underhand.”

“So?” He looked at me in defiance. I wondered if he could tell that I was referring to the smooth lines of his uniform trousers uninterrupted by a knee guard.

I didn’t know if I wanted to laugh or not. “You don’t think I know anything about you, do you?”

“What is there to know?”

“I know you’re mad to the point of having your body suffer for it, and if your hand’s injury is from _pitching_ , your knee is not going to last until the end of your final summer.” His eyes narrowed as I said the last few words, but didn’t retort like I’d expected. “Go home, Suzuki Aoi. Punch your brother like an average person would do when his brother pisses him off. I can’t help you with that no matter how much shiny equipment is gonna be rewarded for the job.”

“The other day. I wasn’t done talking to you.”

“So _what_?”

“ _I wasn’t done talking to you._ ”

“Then maybe you could have waited for me. You were the one who jumped on it like the platform was _diseased_.”

“Are you going to talk to me now?”

“No. I’m gonna head back. Gotta cover my shift, if you’ll excuse me.”

“Hamada!” he shouted at me, voice rough around the edges. I turned back and his hands were balled into fists, for a moment I deluded myself into thinking I had something he would struggle to reach for. “See, I know your name now. I _know_ it. And I can walk through the front door right now shouting it in the lobby so everyone knows! Or at least that kogal I saw, I could tell she tried to get it out of me. Do you think I know nothing about you?”

“You don’t even know my full name.”

“Like that even _matters_.”

The retort came from him with such sincerity that I felt a light going out inside of me. “What exactly do you want from me?”

“Come to Sakitama again this weekend,” he spat it out faster than I’d thought, but swallowed visibly after the words left his mouth. I hadn’t realized that my eyes were following the miniscule movements around his throat, rippling downward into the pristine white neckline of his collarless undershirt. “Tomorrow, I mean. And do it right this time—get on the same train as me when we head back.”

By that time too many thoughts were running through my head, and I knew if I wasn’t done talking to him then, I was just about getting there.

“Does Captain Suzuki know about this?”

“I told you—I do what _I_ think is best.”

There was always something terrible in his voice whenever he said that—sadness, or anger, passive aggression or something else—and that was the beginning of me saying yes to it.

 

You could teach people how to tell what was good for them apart from the bad, but you couldn’t teach them to choose one way over the other.

I went inside, let the door drop slowly enough that it almost did not make a sound when closed.

 

※

 

It just so happened that Suzuki Ryo was not at Sakitama that Saturday. Something about visiting the largest nursery in the prefecture—for flowers and not children, of course—some day trip that his brother was evidently not privy to. The person who informed us of all this was the same little first-year who was in the picture of the ouen banner with Harada-san last week, and it was brave of him to hold Suzuki Aoi’s gaze for as long as he cared to look at a measly freshman from a no-name school. I hoped in some small way that his senpais would bring him flowers when they returned from their class trip as I followed Suzuki Aoi elsewhere, after he turned down the freshman’s offer to serve us tea if we cared to tour the greenhouses.

I couldn’t see Suzuki’s face well, walking beside or behind him, but it was no leap in logic to deduce that asking him “what now” would be unwise. It looked like he was headed for the gates we went through last time, and then he stopped next to a tree, which were abundant around the campus. I gingerly stepped forward and turned to face him, in order to get a better feel of what I should do right then. I didn’t know what I was expecting to see, but his expression wasn’t one that I’d anticipated. He just looked like he wanted something told to him in a precise and reliable manner and I wondered if he was thinking about his captain—the girl captain.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said as firmly as I could.

He looked up at me. “How far is Nishiura from here? I heard it’s close.”

“Ten minutes by train and forty minutes on foot.” I offered up some options so the alternative that I knew he’d pick would look even more appealing in contrast.

“We’ll walk there, then.” He put his hands in his jacket’s pockets and seemed more focused, now. “If he’s not here, then I guess you’ll do.”

 

I didn’t ask how he could have counted on me to understand.

 

※

 

What was there to learn about someone if they’d given you their time of the day?

 

I thought Suzuki and I would, for sure, come to very different answers by the end of the day. Even now I wasn’t sure that we didn’t, but that was beside the point.

In the beginning I didn’t want to say much and neither did he, so we passed the miles of cornfields in silence, the thick of it, while trains whistled by from time to time, until the greenery began to thin into fields of grass, tall and uncut, wires threaded overhead between transmission towers in the distance above us, punctuated by birds’ silhouettes and then nothing.

The thing was—the thing was that I hadn’t been able to sleep that well since last night and I’d known it, I knew it since I saw him in the back alley last night that I’d rather spend my entire night slouching in that old stained office chair behind the counter. This was a business that had been a relic of a time, the entity that remained publicly known in long lines of anonymous histories for some thirty years. In our lifetime we’d never see a new establishment of its kind, the chronicles of such histories had moved to house themselves in the darkness of a fictitious cyberspace that made even the dingiest corners of a love hotel bathroom seemed bright. But these places, my place of employment, I meant; they were born old. Nobody would erect a new building for the operations of a love hotel. If you’d cared for who, or what, had come before you in the tiny square metres that would be sooner erased from your memory than the face of the company you’d brought with you, then you would never find yourself here at all.

I’d rather have spent my night slouched in that old stained office chair in such an establishment than going home knowing that sleep would be a chore in my own bed, an item of errand to be crossed off on a list that would weigh me down further into the mattress as time passed. But company protocol stated I couldn’t do that and I was too tired to sleep on the way home, and even more tired by the time I made it to my bed. I breathed with my bedroom lights off and wondered not for the first time if there could be more to living than this.

A while ago—it’d been a long time, now, I’d learned that there were ways of making things go away if there was anything you didn’t like to feel or think about, and that it was possible to keep doing something bad for you for as long as you wanted as long as you had access to the means required. I’d learned all that, and unlearned it.

The truth to the trick was waking up on the right day and doing the right thing and forgetting to the best of your ability that being selfish was the prerequisite for doing any and all of the above. The problem was that I had a feeling Suzuki Aoi had believed in the same exact mantra, and had even lived by it in the wrong way, so now he couldn’t admit to himself that he felt lost. I wondered if he felt betrayed through the fault of no one whom he could truly hold accountable.

And now we’d passed even the grassy fields. Buildings quietly sprung up and stood along the roads with a different kind of stillness than the crops and grass, disconcerting under the midday sun as there was no real warmth to it on a Saturday afternoon, same with this road—devoid of populations, lifeless. Now stop the thoughts. Put one foot before another, don’t try to overtake the boy who did not know the way but naturally walked in front of you anyway.

How would you lead someone like that if it were indeed a possible course of action in absence of his catcher?

 

I checked the time. Another ten minutes and we’d be at the gates, Suzuki Aoi once again an uninvited tourist.

 

Then he came to a halt when I called his name.

 

※

 

“How d’you get a key?” he asked when I pushed the door open.

I just shrugged. “We don’t lock the gates.” I turned around to look at him just in time to catch the momentary widening of his wide eyes. “Nothing too valuable here except that new machine your brother gave us, but if it’s gone I’m sure he wouldn’t mind delivering another one.”

“Right.” He cleared his throat. “So what’s your plan?”

“Stay here,” I said before running to the dugout, then came back to him with a bat and a ball. He just stared at me. I sighed.

“Take your pick if you will, but I can’t throw so I’m hoping you’d pitch to me.”

“What do you mean? I didn’t take you for a pitcher anyways.” He paused, then added, “Or ex-pitcher.”

“Well.” I trained my eyes on the slight shadow of his hair cast across the bridge of his nose, trying to commit to memory the exactness of the moment: how the air smelled, the humidity or lack thereof, the simmering warmth pooled in the space between the skin of my back and my t-shirt and the stickiness of sweat yet unformed. The sound of gentle winds tousled through the sands of the newly expanded fields, miniscule movements of particles that you could know of but could not see. “Technically I can’t throw. Or bat. My, uh, elbow. It was done when I came out of middle school.”

“That’s a shame.”

“That might be true, but you can’t live with it if that’s how you think of it.”

He nodded—and I wasn’t sure why. “You want to bat?”

“Yeah, just one pitch. If you’d like, I mean.”

He looked at his own right hand as if he’d forgotten the bandage was there until I gestured at it. Then, instead of taking the ball from my hand, he started to unwind the bandage. Perhaps I should have stopped him, but I just watched as the cloth peeled back and revealed ghastly traces of what used to be blisters.

It would be completely irrational but utterly reasonable for him to use so much rubbing powder that the friction would break skin and inflict wounds. His face was calm when he looked at it, though. Like all that mattered was that it brought him some form of peace.

“Wait.” He was going to head to the mound but I put my hand on his shoulder and felt a jolt under my palm, and he turned to me only after the slightest pause.

Like the countless morning meditations under Shiga-sensei’s guidance I took his hand in mine, held it up under the sun and thought I would never forget the patterns that were already beginning to fade. As I looked, he cupped my right elbow with his left hand, the touch light as a feather and I felt nothing but the gentleness of it.

In that moment perhaps any length of time could have passed, and all I could think of was how much time had passed already.

So then I let go, and picked up the ball from the ground. We made eye contact only as it changed hands. He walked to the mound in calculated steps, unbuttoned his gakuran jacket and tossed it to the side, slumped atop the sands as he stood upright, waiting for me to get into batting stance before slowly raising his arms over his head.

I closed my eyes and saw it in my head. I took a breath, deep enough not to have exhaled until the image faded from my mind. I opened my eyes.

“Get ready,” he shouted from the mound and the arms overhead came to a dip, arms curved like parentheses mid air, the pitch came skittering for the bottom edge of the strike zone.

I waited, then I stopped waiting, then I swung.

 

_pang_

 

The ball flew over the mound into the outfield. He didn’t turn to follow its flight, and I only saw where it dropped but not where it rolled off to.

 

All around the fields, it was a patchwork of silence and empty noises. Suzuki stood on the mound with his head hung low, tears streaming down his face. Nowhere to hide on the mound, but he didn’t even have a glove.

 

The air was drier and the sun was warmer and the summer was closer than either of us would ever want it to be, deep down where it mattered. And I kept wondering if I shouldn’t have swung, if I should have said something. If I should have gone up to him and did something, while knowing that the swing was the first and last thing that I could have done to make a difference.

 

If you asked me how many steps there were between the mound and the batter’s box, I wouldn’t know the answer because I’d never walked the distance, but my answer would be twenty. And twenty would probably be a shoddy estimate, because I was never any good at math. Awful, in fact, like my dad always said.

 

※

 

Before I knew Suzuki Aoi, I was tasked with filming him at Oomiya stadium once. Not the game—him, specifically, under the coach’s orders.

Anyone who’d taped games more than a few times would know that chasing the ball was a rookie’s mistake, and it was a simple job because of the coach’s request; I set the camera at the right angle on the tripod and it stayed affixed through the innings.

I didn’t have to watch through the lens of course, but the mound was situated at the golden ratio on the small screen, with the batter almost to the side but not quite. I’d gone through the trouble of learning how to adjust the angle so that it would be just so, and I was too proud of my work to just set it aside.

Nine innings, eighty-six pitches. I tallied every one, followed the curve of the underhand—by the end of it I had the perfect simulation built up in my head, enough to be able to picture myself in the batter’s box opposing him. I’d never gone up against a submarine pitcher, but it was nice to think about.

That day when the pitch came at me, the trajectory coincided perfectly with the one drawn in my head. And in the split second before I raised my arms to swing, I thought about what I wouldn’t give to hear the sound of it hitting the catcher’s mitt from behind—I thought about how Suzuki would be thinking the same.

 

And I realized I couldn’t stand the idea of letting the pitch pass by me.

 

※

 

The following week I came in for my shift and the kogal was there again, the name she picked—which I hated having someone else done for me—was Nakamura.

“There’s someone waiting for you out there again,” she said after a slow draw from her cigarette. “This one doesn’t seem to remember your name, though. They just about look the same.”

I pushed the door open and let it close behind me with a small sound when I saw it was Suzuki Ryo, who’d had his eyes on me the moment the door moved.

“I won’t keep you long,” he said, not choosing to close the distance between us while I had my hand rested on the door handle. “Aoi told me what happened. I suppose I should thank you.”

I shrugged. “There’s no need—well, a text would have sufficed.”

“I came here to tell you he was not supposed to pitch for a week. You must have seen his hand—the doctor said one week.”

“Right. And where were you?”

The corners of his mouth pulled tight at the obvious rhetoric. “You’d be out of your depth if you insist on prying.”

“I don’t mean to, really. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Our ace needs to rest well to be prepared for the summer. I’d appreciate it if you could refrain from interfering.”

I nodded, then he left.

I went inside and wished I could throw something, but I couldn’t—I hadn’t lied to Suzuki Aoi.

 

On the 3am train I called him. It went to voicemail so I called again, and again, and when it was finally picked up I heard only the sound of bed sheets rustling.

 

“Suzuki? Are you there?”

“The hell do you want?”

“Are you talking to your brother now?”

A long pause. “Enough so that he knows enough, I suppose.”

“Good. That’s good, keep that up.”

“Will you get to the point?”

 

“Sure,” I said, leaning back in my seat until I could feel the chill of the glass against the crown of my head. It was still dark out but the sun was already rising somewhere without me.

 

“I’m Hamada Yoshiro. Will you go out with me?”

 

**Author's Note:**

> A brief playlist of songs I have listened to while writing and editing:
> 
> 1) Melted - Akdong Musician  
> 2) No Angels - Bastille ft. Ella Eyre  
> 3) ポルノ映画の看板の下で (Under the Poster of an Erotic Movie) - amazarashi


End file.
